The Bourses paid their dues irregularly and Pelloutier complained that with such means the Committee could not render all the services it was capable of and that it was necessarily reduced to the rôle of a correspondence bureau, "slow and imperfect in its working." Whatever others may have thought of the results obtained by the Federation of Bourses, the leaders themselves felt enthusiastic about the things accomplished. Pelloutier wrote: Enumerate the results obtained by the groupings of workingmen; consult the program, of the courses instituted by the _Bourses du Travail_, a program which omits nothing which goes to make up a moral, complete, dignified and satisfied life; regard the authors who inhabit the workingmen's libraries; admire this syndical and co-operative organization which extends from day to day and embraces new categories of producers, the unification of all the proletarian forces into a close network of syndicats, of co-operative societies, of leagues of resistance; consider the constantly increasing intervention into the diverse manifestations of social life; the examination of methods of production and of distribution and say whether this organization, whether this program, this tendency towards the beautiful and the good, whether this aspiration toward the complete expansion of the individual do not justify the pride the Bourses du Travail feel.[98] [98] F. Pelloutier, _op. cit._, pp. 170-1. This feeling and the preoccupation with socialist ideals led Pelloutier and other members of the Federation to think that the _Bourses du Travail_ could not only render immediate services, but that they were capable of "adapting themselves to a superior social order". Pelloutier thought that the _Bourses du Travail_ were evolving from this time on the elements of a new society, that they were gradually constituting a veritable socialist (economic and anarchic) state within the bourgeois state,[99] and that they would, in time, substitute communistic forms of production and of distribution for those now in existence. The question was brought up for discussion at the Congress of Tours (1896) and two reports were read on the present and future rôle of the _Bourses du Travail_. One report was written by Pelloutier, the other was prepared by the delegates of the Bourse of Nimes, Claude Gignoux and Victorien Briguier (Allemanists). [99] F. Pelloutier, _op. cit._, p. 160.